Six YIVO Alumni Recipients of Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowships
by LEAH FALK
Traduttore, traditore, goes the Italian proverb: to translate is to betray. But at YIVO, the opposite seems true. Six recipients of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2014 Translation Fellowships are fiercely loyal YIVO Max Weinreich Center alumni. The fellows include Beata Kasiarz, Helen Mintz, Sarah Ponichtera, Sasha Senderovich, Anna Torres, and Ri Turner.
Helen Mintz, a storyteller based in Vancouver, wins the long-distance prize for YIVO dedication: she’s been Skyping in to Gennady Estraikh’s advanced Yiddish literary seminar this semester on Yiddish Literature of World War I. (See related post: “Spring Yiddish Classes.”) Anna Torres, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, is a recent Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization alumna.
Beata Kasiarz, Ri Turner, Sasha Senderovich and Sarah Ponichtera all cut their Yiddish teeth at the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program on Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. And then they came back for more: Kasiarz and Turner will both return to the program this year, and Ponichtera, a processing archivist at the Center for Jewish History, will teach.
Ponichtera, who spoke briefly with me about her translation project, will return to a text she was introduced to by Professor Seth Wolitz while a graduate student at UT Austin: Arn Zeitlin’s spy novel Brenendike erd (The Earth Aflame). The novel, based on a true story and informed by Zeitlin’s own travels, reimagines a Jewish spy ring in World War I-era Palestine. The work is a departure for Zeitlin, who was primarily a poet and architect of Yiddish literary modernism. But even working in a popular genre—one that Ponichtera says she can imagine appealing to contemporary readers—Zeitlin’s sophistication shows through. “There’s a point where he animates a hand separately from the person it belongs to…and takes the reader out of the text.”
The emphasis of the Yiddish Book Center Fellowship program is on producing quality literary translation, and all fellows are mentored by an established translator. This emphasis makes it easier to find a publisher after the program, but for a scholar who wants to understand the farthest-reaching connotations of the original Yiddish, it can feel incomplete. This is why it’s great to be able to fall back on YIVO as a resource, says Ponichtera—she knows that if she encounters a linguistic snag, she has knowledgeable colleagues to bring it to.
Other projects YIVO alumni will undertake include the modernist poetry of Esther Shumiatcher-Hirshbein (Kasiarz), Avrom Karpinovitsh’s short stories (Mintz), and Fishl Shneersohn’s Khayim Gravitser (Turner).
Leah Falk is YIVO’s Programs Coordinator.